Post-exercise hot or cold water immersion does not alter perception of effort or neuroendocrine responses during subsequent moderate-intensity exercise.
Experimental physiology · PMID 38970776
HRD Claim Ledger · Living evidence brief
Do cold plunges increase testosterone?
Insufficient direct evidence
The current indexed human evidence does not establish that cold plunges produce a meaningful or durable increase in testosterone. Short-lived hormonal responses to stress or exercise are not the same as a sustained increase, and research on post-exercise cold exposure may answer a different question from routine recreational plunging.
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Evidence profile
What the evidence can—and cannot—support
Human evidenceSparse
Randomized evidenceSparse
ConsistencyUnclear
ReplicationNot established
DirectnessLow
Long-term outcomesNot established
Important uncertainty
Durable hormonal effects would require repeated measurements and an appropriate control group.
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Research Receipt
An auditable count, not “studies show”
Claim checkedCold plunges meaningfully increase testosterone.
Dataset edition2026-09-18
2matched publications
2randomized trials
0reviews / meta-analyses
0registered trials
0active trials
Reproduce this receipt
Included: Records in the Cold-water immersion topic whose high-signal metadata contains at least one outcome term below.
Outcome expression: "testosterone" OR "androgen" OR "hormone" OR "endocrine"
Excluded: Records outside the intervention topic, animal-only records rejected by the source query, and records without an outcome-term match. This is a reproducible index, not a systematic review.
Download receipt JSONMatched publications
Why these records count
Each record matched the intervention topic and at least one claim-specific outcome term. Open a record for source metadata and inclusion provenance.
Acute moderate normobaric hypoxia does not modify circulating thyroid hormone concentrations induced by 1 h of head-out cold-water immersion.
Journal of applied physiology (Bethesda, Md. : 1985) · PMID 38660723
Trial Radar
Evidence that may change the answer
Registration is not a result. Status and dates come from ClinicalTrials.gov.
No directly matched registered trials are in the current indexed snapshot.
Cite this page
Make the evidence trail portable.
Health Research Database. “Do cold plunges increase testosterone?” HRD Claim Ledger. Dataset 2026-09-18. Accessed 2026-09-18.
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